As you may know, the creators of games like Grand Theft Auto have collaborated with Timbaland to bring a mobile music studio to Sony’s PSP (and later, the iPhone), based on an ambitious free Flash experiment on their Website. Now, it’s my impassioned belief that you shouldn’t need lots of canned loops or celebrity endorsements to make music fun, so normally I might actually run the opposite direction of any story starting with that line. But here’s the surprise: underneath, the app is more powerful than I expected.

I’ve gotten an early preview of the title in person at Rockstar’s offices here in New York, and was also able to grill their developers on geeky details of how the sound engine is put together. A test copy isn’t yet available so I can’t properly review the app, but I am at least able to talk about some of what lies beneath the PSP screens and marketing.

For some time, a select few have known that the Sony PSP’s secret is that it’s a powerful handheld computer, ideal for mobile music. Brilliant-but-underground apps like PSPSEQ and PSP Rhythm capitalized on this potential, but required you hack your PSP in order to run them, because Sony restricts launching non-authorized applications from memory.

Beaterator is the first full-featured app that can be run directly on the PSP. Some people may not look past the fact that it comes from a game company, past its (admittedly) thick layer of marketing glitz and celebrity endorsement. But based on a first look, I believe Beaterator is the most powerful music app ever released through game channels, surpassing in functionality even the recent cult hit Korg DS-10 for the Nintendo DS.

MusicRadar’s Joe Bosso reports that the long-simmering controversy over alleged 8-bit music intellectual property theft has come to a lawsuit:

Timbaland, Nelly Furtado sued for plagiarism [MusicRadar]

The suit is being brought by the Finland-based Kernel Records, which acquired the song Acidjazzed Evening. The case again puts musical sampling in the spotlight. Timbaland’s response in 2007, which you can read in the MusicRadar article, basically amounted to “I didn’t know where it came from, so it’s not theft.”

Oh, and then there’s this gem:
“It’s from a video game, idiot.”

That’ll be Timbaland demonstrating that he doesn’t understand what 8-bit music (this tune is, of course, not from a video game) nor how sampling law works (video games aren’t subject to some different set of ethical and legal rules). I mean, if Timbaland were going all radical on us and declaring all content should be free, that’d be another matter.

One has to wonder if a different kind of sampling culture is possible, a third option, in which artists knowingly release work as Creative Commons so they provide explicit permission for people to sample — and get credited. Of course, that’s a touchy subject with the likes of a Timbaland or Nelly Furtado, whose massive commercial success at least implies that they may be able to afford to pay for their samples.

So much has been said on this particular case, let alone the underlying issues, that I’ll leave it to you to discuss.

Whatever your opinion, though, the message is clear that 8-bit music is not simply free for the taking.

Previously: Crystal Castles gets caught up in a similar sort of “we didn’t know, so it doesn’t count” (though unlike Timbaland/Nelly Furtado, their track was not widely released, let alone a huge chart hit). Original story / Crystal Castles responds to allegations.